Many optimization problems that involve practical applications have functional constraints, and some of these constraints
are active, meaning that they prevent any solution from improving the objective function value to the one that is better than
any solution lying beyond the constraint limits. Therefore, the optimal solution usually lies on the boundary of the feasible
region. In order to converge faster when solving such problems, a new ranking and selection scheme is introduced which exploits
this feature of constrained problems. In conjunction with selection, a new crossover method is also presented based on three
parents. When comparing the results of this new algorithm with six other evolutionary based methods, using 12 benchmark problems
from the literature, it shows very encouraging performance. T-tests have been applied in this research to show if there is
any statistically significance differences between the algorithms. A study has also been carried out in order to show the
effect of each component of the proposed algorithm.
Keywords constrained continuous optimization - evolutionary computation - genetic algorithms - multi-parent crossover